Wide Open School
Content Design, Strategy, and Curriculum, 2020-2021
Wide Open School launched in late March 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. I served as editorial director for the project, leading a team of content creators and learning designers. Wide Open School was a free website dedicated to helping families and educators adapt to distance learning. It was supported by nineteen funders and assisted by dozens of partner organizations. Common Sense spearheaded the effort, with design and engineering support by Amplify Learning.
This was an extraordinary project for unprecedented times. There were only two to three weeks from conceptualization of Wide Open School to launch and within the first three months we’d published close to 2,000 pieces of content. The content vision was to collect and highlight (via daily schedules) quick, quality learning activities that families of any means could use. While most of this content was curated from trusted sources it was all vetted, re-written, and re-framed for our audience. Wide Open School was a huge success, garnering a large and dedicated audience, including a custom version for NYC Schools — the largest district in the nation.
As editorial director for the project, I had to juggle learning design, content design and strategy, and editorial operations. Along the way I set the learning goals, created the content’s tone, voice, and style, and established the editorial standards, guidelines, and processes. I also helped to advise the product and design teams and helped out with UX writing.
Selected Press Coverage
“Common Sense Launches ‘Wide Open School’ to Assist with Remote Learning” in THE Journal
“4 free online resources for kids that celebrate Black history and culture” in Mashable
“Stressed out and overwhelmed by distance learning? Here are some resources that might help” in Sacramento Bee
“Wide Open School organizes free educational resources to help parents and teachers homeschool” in Tech Crunch
“World Changing Ideas Awards 2021: Pandemic Response Finalists and Honorable Mentions” in Fast Company
